


Unsteady

by Sohotthateveryonedied



Category: Batman (Comics), Red Robin (Comics)
Genre: ? - Freeform, Angst, Anxiety, Anxiety Attacks, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, I'll probably come back and do last-minute edits tomorrow, Mental Health Issues, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Self-Harm, Tim has OCD, also Tim has anxiety, but for now I just wanna get this boi posted, but not really, he's a mess okay, hello folks and welcome to suffering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-22
Packaged: 2020-07-10 13:10:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19906252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sohotthateveryonedied/pseuds/Sohotthateveryonedied
Summary: Today is going to be a bad day. Tim can already feel it.Can feel it in the tremors that bubble just underneath his skin, itching to press the snooze button five times with each finger, and then another ten times just in case. Can feel it in the way the sight alone of his messy room sends his stomach into fitful spirals.Yep. It's going to be a bad one.





	Unsteady

**Author's Note:**

> Gotta make this fast because I'm trying not to fall asleep because I'm Tired SO:
> 
> First off, this whole fic is basically just me projecting because I do the majority of the weird and obsessive stuff that Tim does in this story. I don't know if I actually have OCD though, but y'know. Secondly, my best friend in the universe Julie helped me with the ending and I appreciate her so much. Also I wrote this in a little less than 24-hours aren't you proud of me. 
> 
> Enjoy!

**6:00 AM** **  
****  
**Today is going to be a bad day. Tim can already feel it.  
  
Can feel it in the tremors that bubble just underneath his skin, itching to press the snooze button five times with each finger, and then another ten times just in case. Can feel it in the way the sight alone of his messy room sends his stomach into fitful spirals.  
  
He sits up in bed and, after pressing the snooze button twice with each hand, reaches for the pill bottles on his nightstand. He swallows them dry, all without bothering to look at the labels. As a kid with no spleen but enough anxiety to drown him daily, he’s found a groove of sorts.  
  
He thinks he might be able to keep his cool today—at least until he can retire after patrol tonight and let the nonsense take over in a more or less _controlled_ environment. He thinks it’ll be fine.  
  
That is, until his fingers start tapping on the mattress and the jitters in his head refuse to clear.  
  
Yep. It’s going to be a bad one.  
  
 **6:07 AM**  
  
He grabs a button-down from one of the piles on the floor and slips it on. His “good” shoes have gum on the bottom, so he throws them back in the closet and shuts the door. He’ll wear the other pair today and burn the contaminated one tomorrow.  
  
Tim knows it must be a silly image—the guy who once cried when Jason licked his hand as a joke also having the messiest room in the manor for the vast majority of the time. It’s ridiculous, really.  
  
He doesn’t bother to make the bed; but he double, triple, and quadruple checks that his calendar is perfectly straight where it hangs on the wall. His bedroom floor is a sea of junk and clothes and wadded-up papers; yet he sanitizes the doorknob every morning, afternoon, and night.  
  
There is no method to the madness; only more madness.  
  
 **6:16 AM**  
  
Dick is in the kitchen working on a plate of French toast by the time Tim gets there. He counts his footsteps all the way from his room to the kitchen, then takes an extra one to make it an even thirty-two.  
  
Dick grins. “Hey, kid.”  
  
Tim goes right for the coffee maker; doesn’t look at Dick for more than a second. Nods toward Dick’s hand. “You’ve got syrup on you.”  
  
In Tim’s peripheral Dick rolls his eyes and licks the dollop of maple syrup off the back of his hand. Tim tries not to cringe, but his hand instinctively reaches for the bottle of sanitizer in his pocket. He holds himself back. It’s fine. He’s fine.  
  
He presses the power button on the coffee maker with his thumb, and then again with the other. Does this another eight times for an even sixteen. Presses it a final time with both, so that at least the itch in his fingertips will subside for now and he can make his coffee in peace.  
  
Dick notices—Tim knows he does. It’s funny. Most of the time he’s pretty adept at flying under the radar with his tics. He supposes this day he isn’t so lucky: craziness demands an audience.  
  
Dick gives him a strange look, but Tim ignores it, and after a while Dick does as well. He’s long since given up on trying to understand Tim’s encyclopedia of habits. Small blessings in large seas.

* * *

  
  
A long time ago Bruce confronted Tim on his “weird” behaviors.  
  
The way he can’t help himself from straightening the objects on Bruce’s cluttered desk until every pencil is aligned at a perfect ninety-degree angle, and only then can he focus. The way he refuses to fall asleep in a car, because he knows that if he does it will immediately crash. Refuses to be anything but the last to go to bed at night, otherwise someone will certainly slaughter everyone in the house if he’s not awake.  
  
Or like how he refuses to go on missions that involve Killer Croc anymore, for the smell of a rancid sewer forces him to escape as soon as possible and inhale fumes from sanitizer or bleach to chase out the invisible particles and bacteria and _germs_ infecting his lungs. Because that’s the only way to make his insides clean and uncontaminated.  
  
Or how he refuses to go in any body of water, for despite all reassurances he cannot avoid the matter that they are filled to the brim with germs and sweat and hair grease and skin cells and urine and spit, and so just the _thought_ of being in a swimming pool has Tim’s heart racing, panicked.  
  
See? Funny. Especially because, up until Bruce brought it up, Tim hadn’t any idea that those kinds of thoughts weren’t normal.  
  
 _Have you ever considered seeing someone about all this?_ Bruce asked, gentle as he knew how to be.  
  
Tim’s blood chilled. _I’m not crazy._ _  
__  
__I never said you were._ _  
__  
__It doesn’t interfere with my work,_ Tim insisted. _It doesn’t make me any worse a partner than I would be otherwise. I have it under control._  
  
Did he?  
  
 _Does_ he?

* * *

  
  
**8:23 AM**  
  
There’s a meeting at work this morning. Tim is still so young that the board members don’t take him seriously, and it makes him question why they continue to let him attend at all. It’s why he fixes his eyeline on the wall above Lucius Fox’s head and tunes out everything the department heads are saying, otherwise risk losing his already-tedious cool.  
  
Most of the office jokes about it. Not to his face, but Tim knows they do.  
  
 _Wayne kid’s a germaphobe. I heard that he, like, freaks out when you shake his hand. What a priss._  
  
Which of course is completely inaccurate. Tim doesn’t _freak out._ He just needs to wash his hands as soon as possible or else do several hand sanitizer cleanings if he can’t get to a sink fast enough.  
  
But he doesn’t _freak out,_ as they say. He’s not crazy.  
  
Apparently nobody told the joke to the Lexcorp representative who attended the meeting. Tim couldn’t turn down the offered handshake, but he regretted it immediately after. He can already feel the grime and bacteria sinking into his skin, spreading through his pores like dye to water.  
  
He knows. He knows it shouldn’t be a big deal. But when you think about it, this is a perfectly reasonable discomfort. Nobody washes their hands as much as Tim does. He knows they don’t. He knows that people ignore the germ colonies living on their own skin, and now it’s on _his_ skin and he’s going to get infected with who knows how many diseases, and so of course this is a _perfectly reasonable concern._  
  
All throughout the meeting, he tries. He tries to focus. But every time his attention sticks, his brain sends him another reminder of the germs currently infecting his body, and his thoughts are once again fixed on his hand.  
  
It’s not long before the urge is too much for him to bear.  
  
Ever so carefully, Tim slips his bottle of hand sanitizer out of his pocket and cleans his hands under the table, out of sight. A second time. A third time. A fourth. Until he knows without looking that the skin on his hands is dry and cracked from the dry air mixed with the alcohol.  
  
Oh well. Not like they weren’t already like that anyway. And at least they’re _clean, now._  
  
As he gives them a fifth scrub-down, he catches Lucius eyeing him from across the table. He knows he’s just earned himself another lecture about how unbecoming it is to act this way, especially given his position as CEO, but he knows that resisting the urge would have been far worse than giving in to it.  
  
Not like Tim doesn’t already know everything Lucius is bound to tell him, anyway. This will make the eighth scolding, and Tim can’t help feeling satisfied in the fact that at least it’ll be an even number this time.  
  
 **9:42 AM**  
  
Jason is supposed to meet him for lunch at 9:45.  
  
Tim checks the text from yesterday six times between the Wayne office and the diner, just to make sure that the plans didn’t magically change while he wasn’t looking. Or that he read it wrong the first time. Or that he somehow hallucinated the entire conversation. Or a dozen more reasons Tim clings to in order to make his obsessive checking and re-checking seem somewhat logical.  
  
Jason comments neither on the way Tim chews every bite of his salad thirty-two times, nor the fact that he doesn’t stop tapping his fingers on the table in four-finger patterns—switching hands every tenth round and adding his thumb to the staccato every fifth.  
  
He and Jason have an understanding when it comes to weird stuff. It’s why Tim turns a blind eye every time Jason jumps when a clock ticks too loudly. And why Jason doesn’t comment on how Tim pulls obsessively at his hair when he’s anxious.  
  
Crazies stick together, after all.  
  
 **10:58 AM**  
  
Tim gets dirty water on his pant leg.  
  
He’s filling his coffee cup in the WE office’s small kitchen, and one of the custodians is cleaning a spill in front of the sink. His mop mistakenly bumps into the bucket beside Tim’s leg, and water splashes onto his pants.  
  
It’s not much. Just a small soak over his ankle. The custodian apologizes, but Tim barely hears it over his racing heartbeat.  
  
He trips over his own feet as he scrambles to his office and scrubs the stain out with paper towels and two different cleaners. He tries to pretend there aren’t tears in his eyes, just as he pretends that the way he can’t seem to pull in a real breath is completely normal.  
  
 _I’m not crazy I’m not crazy I’m not crazy_ —  
  
He takes the rest of the day off. **  
****  
****11:33 AM**  
  
On the way home, Tim steps on a crack in the parking lot.  
  
He stops. Hesitates.  
  
But then that itch starts up right at the forefront of his mind, and he’s powerless to help it as he backtracks and steps on the crack again with his other foot.  
  
And then continues on his merry way, trying to pretend that this is normal. It’s fine. It’s normal.  
  
 **11:51 AM**

As soon as he enters the manor, (covering the doorknob with a handkerchief to avoid any more skin/germ contact than necessary), Titus rushes at him, tongue flopping and tail wagging.  
  
Tim pats him once on the head before veering to the kitchen, knowing he won’t be able to handle it if the dog licks him. He washes his hands. Then again a second time, just to be safe.  
  
Alfred walks in as Tim is patting his hands dry with a dish towel. “Home early, Master Timothy?”  
  
He shrugs. “Bad day.”  
  
Alfred frowns. “I’m sorry to hear that. I was about to make some soup for Master Damian. I’ll set aside an extra bowl for you.”  
  
Tim smiles and thanks him, and after that makes a quick escape. He knows what Alfred is thinking. _Poor lad is losing it again._  
  
Which isn’t true. Tim’s not crazy.  
  
 **12:01 PM**  
  
Tim goes up to his room and changes into new, _clean_ clothes. While he’s struggling into his jeans he knocks his elbow into the desk and it hurts like hell.  
  
So he knocks the other one to make it symmetrical, and that hurts too.  
  
 **3:38 PM**  
  
Stephanie comes over to watch some movies. Tim can tell by the look on her face that she knows today is one of his bad days. She doesn’t comment, though, and Tim hasn’t yet decided if he’s grateful for that or not.  
  
They sit together on the couch, Steph with her head in Tim’s lap. Tim’s arm is draped over her stomach, and he counts every one of her breaths.  
  
 _One...two...three...four. One...two...three...four. One...two...three...four._  
  
It becomes impossible to concentrate on the movie when Tim starts to feel that telltale itch in his fingertips again. So he fishes for his phone and starts clicking the volume buttons up and down, just to alleviate the jitters in his brain. Up with his right thumb, down with his left, then twice with his right, followed by twice with his left, on and on until the action becomes a background detail.  
  
Steph looks up at him and frowns. “You okay?”  
  
“Fine.” Except for the fact that his knee started shaking a minute ago, but that’s also fine. He’s fine.  
  
Steph doesn’t look convinced, and she reaches up to take his hand in hers. Then, after a moment of consideration, takes the other one too. She knows Tim well enough by now that he doesn’t need to tell her it needs to be even.  
  
She kisses his knuckles. “Did you take your meds today?”  
  
He nods silently. Every day is a gamble with him—Steph knows that by now. So instead of prying, she sits back again and leaves Tim to his beehive of thoughts. Usually if he’s given some time he can ride out the obsessions sooner or later. Today doesn’t seem like one of those days, though.  
  
When Stephanie leaves hours later, Tim kisses her. And as he pulls away, as usual, he’s hit with the uncontainable urge to kiss her again. Not just because he loves her—though that is certainly true as well—but because it needs to be even.  
  
Instead he clamps his lips tightly together between his teeth in an attempt to alleviate the ache. Steph doesn’t miss the look in his eyes and rolls her own, pulling him closer by the back of his neck.  
  
“All right, get back here, Ex-Boy Wonder.” And she kisses him again. Because she understands. She doesn’t get it all the way, but she understands.  
  
Tim doesn’t know what he would do without her.  
  
 **5:33 PM**  
  
“Why are you doing that?”  
  
Tim looks down to where Cass is pointing at his laptop keyboard. He’s reading a news article covering several muggings downtown. As he reads, he’s been pressing the shift keys repeatedly.  
  
 _Four times with the right thumb, four with the left, four times with the right index, four with the left—_  
  
He forces out a chuckle, but it’s more like a cough. “Huh. Didn’t realize I was doing it.” And hopes she’ll drop the topic.  
  
She doesn’t. “Does it...help?”  
  
“Help what?”  
  
She points to her head, and Tim’s gut swims. He’s not embarrassed by his tics. Even though he is. A lot.  
  
He hesitates. “I don’t know.”  
  
“Why do you do it then?”  
  
He finds he has no answer, so he settles with, “Because it’s better than not doing it.”  
  
 **6:42 PM**  
  
Tim gives up on distracting himself with work once his hands start shaking. In fact, his body and mind are practically vibrating with what he can’t tell is anxiety or too much caffeine.  
  
So he cleans his room. He empties his dresser and refolds his clothes before putting them back categorized by color which is so much _smarter,_ anyway. He scrubs the stain off the wall from when Damian threw a tea bag at him two months ago. He takes all of his books out of the shelves and rearranges them alphabetically, and then does the same with his CDs.  
  
He bleaches the floor and walls and shelves and every other surface he can find until the cleaning spray makes his hands itch and he feels lightheaded from the fumes.  
  
But the jitters don’t stop there—the need to organize and cleanse and de-germ still vibrates in the ache behind his eyes. So he goes downstairs and cleans Alfred’s already spotless kitchen. Scrubs the countertops and sanitizes the coffee maker and disinfects the doorknob.  
  
And then he proceeds to disinfect all of the other doorknobs too, because it’s so much more _convenient_ to do that _anyway._ Eliminates the colonies of bacteria that have surely accumulated, spreading and infecting and poisoning every surface they can.  
  
All the while, Dick and Damian sit and watch. They share a bag of Funyuns and say not a word as Tim goes on his anxiety-fueled cleaning spree—(it’s not his worst one, but it’s not his best either)—until Tim manages to coax the jitters down to a bearable level and is okay enough to stop.  
  
He collapses on the couch, taking out his hand sanitizer for the nth time today and squirting a generous amount into his palm, just to be sure his hands are completely clean. Despite having been doused in cleaning chemicals for the past three hours.  
  
He doesn’t meet their stares. “I’m not crazy, you know.” It sounds more defensive than he intends it to.  
  
Dick nods patiently. “Did you take your—”  
  
“If another person asks me if I took my meds yet today, I’m breaking out the bo staff.”  
  
Dick snorts, but he puts his hands up in surrender. “Fair enough. You patrolling with me or Bruce tonight?” he asks instead.  
  
“Depends. Who’s the demon going with?”  
  
Damian sneers and throws a Funyun at Tim’s forehead with pristine accuracy. Tim wipes the crumbs off when they fall on his shirt before throwing it back. “I’m going with _Father,_ so don’t wait up.”  
  
Tim raises an eyebrow. “Good to know.”  
  
 **8:14 PM**  
  
Going on patrol was a mistake.  
  
Tim is filled with a quivering, impatient sort of energy that he can’t seem to shake. It makes him sloppy. Distracted.  
  
Clayface escaped last night, and Batman’s been too busy with more important matters than babysitting a walking mud pie, so he pushed the task onto Nightwing and Red Robin. Not that Tim minds much _. Finally_ something that will hopefully satiate his juddering mind for the time being.   
  
They track him down five blocks west of Crime Alley, and to say he doesn’t want to go quietly is an understatement. It isn’t long before a fight breaks out, which. Yeah that’s pretty expected, but that doesn’t mean it’s convenient.  
  
Everything is going well until Tim’s glove rips.  
  
He doesn’t know how it happened; he was more or less distracted by the flying globs of clay and the civilians who had to be directed to safety. But somehow, his glove must have snagged on something—most likely one of the many rounds of flying shrapnel, courtesy of Clayface’s tantrum—and ripped from thumb to pinkie, exposing his palm.  
  
Tim pays it no mind. Bruce’s batsuit gets torn to pieces upwards of five times a week, after all.  
  
But then Clayface blindsides him with a punch he doesn’t see coming, and instinctively Tim throws his arms up in front of his face. The hit lands, and Tim doesn’t feel the pain so much as the _clay._  
  
Now, Tim’s cowl covers the majority of his face and head, and there were already splatters of clay on his chin from earlier that he couldn’t care less about now. Clayface and his sludge is nothing new.   
  
But when Tim sees the clay and mud and _dirt_ on his palm, something in his brain fizzles and pops like a blown circuit. And yes, he knows it makes no sense. He knows it’s completely nonsensical. He _knows._  
  
So why does his chest feel so tight? Why can’t he focus on a single thing aside from _dirt dirt dirt bacteria germs dirt_ until his mind spins like a top?  
  
In that half-second of hesitation, Tim is so trapped in his own mind that he doesn’t see the second fist coming his way. Not until a thick, sharp pain erupts in his side, and he’s flying backward from the force of it. His back slams into the brick wall behind him and he lands in a slump on the ground, gasping.  
  
“Red!” Dick yells from...somewhere. Tim’s head is still spinning too much to land on anything concrete. That is, aside from his hand. His filthy, tainted hand.  
  
He can feel the slimy muck on his palm, fraught with who _knows_ how many bacteria and microbes and _oh god oh god oh god._ Tim’s lungs feel tight, but it’s yet undetermined whether that’s from the broken ribs or from what has to be the beginnings of an anxiety attack.  
  
A second later, Dick is at his side. He’s helping Tim sit up, but Tim bats him away with his clean hand. “Clayface,” he gasps. “Where’s—”  
  
Dick ignores the question and is checking Tim over for injuries. “Are you okay? What happened? Why did you freeze up like that?”  
  
Tim’s too dizzy to understand much of what Dick is saying. Or perhaps that’s because of his own panicked breaths, combined with the blood rushing in his ears. _Germs, bacteria, viruses_ —  
  
Shoving Dick away, Tim frantically digs through his utility belt with trembling fingers until his uninfected hand locates a small bottle and Tim shudders with relief as he covers his hand in sanitizer until the bottle is empty, but he knows it won’t be enough. There’s too much, too much mud, too many germs, too much, too _much—_  
  
“Timmy, whoa, it’s okay,” Dick says from beside him, sounding a little panicked himself now. “Calm down, you’re okay.”  
  
Tim doesn’t know how to tell him that _no,_ everything is _not_ okay. There are too many germs and not enough air and now Clayface is gone and Tim _knows_ it’s stupid. He knows that this is the _dumbest fucking thing_ in the entire _world_ to have an attack like this over.  
  
Dick’s hand on the back of his neck. “Tim. Tim, look at me.” Tim does, and it isn’t until then that he realizes he’s _crying_ and _what a stupid fucking thing to cry over_ — “Just breathe, okay? You’re okay. Everything’s okay. Just breathe.”  
  
And isn’t this just the funniest thing? Because Clayface got away. He slipped right through their fingers, all because of Tim’s _stupid_ issues making his life an uncontrollable caricature of hell itself.  
  
Tim nearly laughs. Here he is, hyperventilating and crying and listening to Dick tell him that _it’s okay, just calm down,_ and he wants to laugh. Because only crazy people can fuck up this badly. Only crazy Tim Drake can fuck up this badly.  
  
Even _funnier_ a realization is that it makes sense. He’s the crazy one. _Of course I am,_ he thinks hysterically. _Dick is the oldest, Jason is the rebel, and I’m the crazy guy._  
  
And the worst part is that Tim’s side hurts like hell where Clayface hit him. The forming bruise throbs with each beat of his pulse, one of his ribs is broken, and every breath feels like he’s inhaling a hundred tiny cheese graters.  
  
And yet, all Tim wants is for someone to break a rib on the other side, just so it will be even.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! If you leave a comment, I promise to leave a gift basket of kittens on your front stoop. 
> 
> [Feel free to mosey on down to my Tumblr!](http://sohotthateveryonedied.tumblr.com/)


End file.
